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For a look outside presidential bubble, Obama reads 10 personal letters each day

Gallery
Presidential letters: Obama connects to the people by reading his mail
Each day, President Obama reads 10 pieces of correspondence representing a 
sampling of the tens thousands of letters that are addressed to the White House. 
Sometimes, he writes back.
» LAUNCH PHOTO GALLERY

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      Dear Mr. President...
      View PDF files of letters sent to President Obama and his hand-written 
      responses. 

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Volunteers deal mainly with e-mail, which comes at a rate of 100,000 missives 
per week but is the easiest to process, because a computer program searches for 
key words and then categorizes the messages. Only experienced volunteers or 
interns answer the phones. They wear headsets and sit at one of 25 "comment line 
stations," instructed to limit each call to two minutes. Callers hoping to give 
feedback to the president sometimes wait on hold for an hour before they reach a 
cubicle on the ninth floor. Each comment line has an automatic transfer button 
for suicide calls or threats. On a good day, the correspondence staff speaks 
with 2,000 callers. 
This Story
  Dear Mr. President . . .: A letter to Obama, and a life touched in return
  Interactive: Read letters to Obama and his responses
  Presidential letters: Obama connects to the people by reading his mail
Paper mail requires the most work. Cline's envelope from Michigan waited 
alongside the 5,000 letters and 4,000 faxes that arrive each day, and White 
House policy demands that each must be read, in part to identify threats. 
On the morning of Jan. 8, a 24-year-old named Nicole Stickel arrived at her desk 
and grabbed a stack of mail. She had volunteered for Obama during the campaign 
and then moved home to Iowa before being offered an entry-level position as a 
mail analyst for $36,000 a year. Her job is to read 200 to 350 letters each day, 
from 8:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. Supervisors instruct her not to divulge details of her 
job to family or friends. The messages are private, they say, intended for the 
president only. 
She started reading the mail and sorting it into piles. Some were 
policy-specific notes that she rerouted to government agencies, dropping them in 
bins labeled "Justice," "Education" and "HUD." About 20 percent were from people 
requesting a specific presidential greeting to commemorate a new baby, a 
military retirement or a birthday. Dozens of 80-to-99-year-olds, for instance, 
wanted birthday cards, so the correspondence office sent each back a form letter 
signed by the president and first lady. "You have witnessed great milestones in 
our Nation's history," the letter read, "and your life represents an important 
part of the American story." 
But Stickel's biggest job was to organize the mail into about 70 subject folders 
-- an ever-changing list of categories that offers a barometer of the nation's 
priorities. About half of the letters in February focused on health-care reform; 
about half last November focused on the war in Afghanistan. Six to 10 percent of 
all letters amount to fan mail for Obama, offering him support. Other regular 
categories include Global Warming, Faith and Politics, Gas Prices, Fort Hood, 
Death Penalty, Darfur, H1N1, Iran, Jobs, First Lady, Torture, From Inmates, 
POTUS Health and Single Parents. 

Every note is responded to with a form letter. Kids are also sent a picture of 
Bo, the first family's dog, posed on the White House lawn. Stickel and other 
employees are never allowed to write a reply to a letter without the approval of 
Mike Kelleher, director of correspondence. The office instead relies on hundreds 
of form letters -- a polished response for each anticipated comment or query. An 
Emerging Issues Committee meets regularly to predict the next popular topics and 
craft new letters. 
As Stickel read through her stack, she looked for compelling pieces that were 
representative of the rest of the mail and pertinent to the news. She picked the 
best three to five and wrote "sample" at the top, designating letters that could 
be sent to the president. "Those are the ones that stick in your head," she 
said. 
* * * 
Early in the afternoon, a few hundred "sample" letters arrived in Kelleher's 
corner office, and he spread them across a table to choose Obama's 10. Kelleher, 
an Illinois native who once worked as the outreach director for Obama's Senate 
office, had been instructed to remain unbiased in picking the contents of the 
purple folder. The president wanted not necessarily the best pieces of mail, or 
the longest, or the most encouraging, he told aides. He wanted a representative 
sample: letters complimentary and critical, elegant and hurried. So Kelleher 
made it his habit to look at the daily metrics of incoming mail -- for example, 
60 percent about health-care reform, 30 percent about jobs, 10 percent about 
Iraq -- and reflect that same mix in picking the day's 10 letters. 
On one typical afternoon, Kelleher selected a diverse collection for the folder: 
an e-mail supporting the use of reconciliation for health-care legislation, and 
another opposing it; a boss writing on behalf of an employee without medical 
insurance; a woman from Ohio forwarding best wishes on behalf of her deceased 
mother; a constituent upset about government spending "beyond our means"; a 
credit card user whose monthly payment had jumped from $140 to $340; a 
9-year-old whose parents could no longer afford to throw him a birthday party at 
Chuck E. Cheese. 
Kelleher reached across his table on a Friday in early January and grabbed a 
letter from Monroe, Mich. It was longer than average, but it dealt with 
of-the-moment topics such as unemployment and health care. It reflected both the 
country's problems and its promise -- just the kind of story that Kelleher 
guessed his boss would appreciate. He placed it in the purple folder, along with 
nine others, and Jennifer Cline's letter was hand-delivered to the White House. 
* * * 


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  » A letter to Obama, and a life touched in return
  • Interactive: Read letters to Obama and his responses
  • Presidential letters: Obama connects to the people by reading his mail

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